How much supercomputing can you do with $2,500 worth of hardware? The four teams competing in the SC13 Student Cluster Commodity Track Competition will answer precisely this question - and more.
The Commodity Track is a new addition to the SC Student Cluster Competition event this year.
We all know and love the Standard Track …

Who says it's got to be x86 ?

Re: Who says it's got to be x86 ?

A few years ago maybe, but even my old 80Gb (okay, it WAS 80Gb, it's now 500 Gb) PS3 can no longer be used as a Linux box due to the updates to the machine. Remember they removed the ability to install another OS after someone found the master security. Unless there's a way to hack it back to a previous bios?

Use a stack of old Dell computers

Plenty of Core 2 Duo Dell computers available on ebay for under £70 each - 16 of those plus gigabit network cards, a 16 port gigabit switch and a monitor should make for a reasonable cluster (and just stay inside the power budget).

Re: Shame that the Parallela isn't currently shipping

The cluster version (4 Parallela boards, plus board interconnects and power supply) is IIRC $575, so 4 of them would be in budget. You could use individual boards, but without fast board-to-board interconnects so your limiting factor would be your Gigabit Ethernet, plus you still have to mount and power them.

Oh, as a BTW, you can buy the raw chips currently @ $595 for 8 of them.

I'd definitely go used.

There is so much used gear that can be had for cheap or free. I have an 16 blade (8 blades are populated)c7000 Blade chassis a former employer was throwing in the garbage and gave to me for nothing. 104 AMD 2.5Ghz Cores and 640GB Memory and I still have all the money. I have it running in the basement on 2 115v 30A Circuits but it can easily run on one. I have 32TB of equallogic storage and a 12TB EMC courtesy of the same former employer.

Re: I'd definitely go used.

There is so much used gear that can be had for cheap or free

I read in a previous article that "[t]eams will have to disclose the source and retail price of their components". I'm not sure if that rules out buying second-hand stuff off ebay or the like, but it would probably rule out "free" stuff that you managed to get through friends/contacts.

Re: Ebay it

Re: Ebay it

There's a company over in Hong Kong selling quad-CPU (AMD Opteron 8356) boxes.for under $1500. 16 cores, 2.3GHz, 16GB with a 500GB drive. Upgrade the memory to 64GB and you might have something to show. Only a single PCIe (x16) slot, though. 4 GbE ports, but since all your CPUs are on the same board you shouldn't need that much bandwidth.

Easy...

"There's a company over in Hong Kong selling quad-CPU (AMD Opteron 8356) boxes.for under $1500. 16 cores, 2.3GHz, 16GB with a 500GB drive."

The rules do require at least a 2 nodes, so you'd have to shave something off the specs there to get it down to $1250 a unit. But yes 8-)

I think there's three possible strategies...

1) Heavy reliance on GPUs. These may be slow for a few benchmarks (if money is spent on GPUs instead of CPUs) but would heavily accelerate others. Regarding the compiler, gcc does support autoparallelization (for Intel chips, using MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3/etc. instructions to speed up vector operations pretty much)... If any project supports turning these into GPGPU code instead (for NVidia CUDA or the like), they could find boards with maximum number of PCIe slots, shove some cards in and clean up. They will want to carefully select a card, since power use and cost both drop like a rock as you go from "top of the line" to "pretty damned fast".

2) ARMs? Someone may lay out a large number of ARM cores. ARMs plus GPUs would be particularly interesting.

3) Used hardware. They can get some rack mount Xeon systems or whatever, balancing out cost versus the power usage cap (and possibly space depending on if the systems are 1U or what..)

Time to make some phone calls

I just bought a quad Xeon with 8Gb of RAM off the boss at work for £75 (upgrading my old 32 bit server to 64 bit). Given that these guys are far deeper into the industry than me and therefore are much more likely to know people they can purchase ex-refresh equipment from on the very cheap, I can see some surprisingly good configurations popping up!